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Dear Chuck

I had already posted the message directly to the PhD-Design list since I
felt that this would be appropriate and help develop a discussion on the
various routes that each of us have used to arrive at a fairly common set
of knowledge resources as well as beliefs about a subject and this was in
particular reference to the area of Design Theory and Design Thinking. Your
list is a wonderful effort to share your personal route and it reveals the
journey that you have made and sets many of your papers in perspective
while giving us a glimpse of your position along the way.

I realised these differences in approaches when I compared my own list of
sources with that of Fritzjof Capra's bibliography offered at the back of
his books when he was dealing with the subject of systems thinking and
sustainable models for human futures, areas that I too have been writing
about over the years. My own list varied quite a bit but we had arrived at
much the same conclusions and the difference was that he was using
primarily scientific sources while was using sources from design and
architecture and there were few overlaps. This reminds me of the
discussions on this list that spoke of two sides of a river in spate, the
two banks on which we stand are quite divided and there do not seem to be
too many bridges that connect the two it seems!!

A chronological listing of sources is not adequate to figure out the manner
in which the concepts were assimilated by an author or even a community of
scholars since we know that the papers may have existed after they were
penned but these may have been accessed only when the author either made
contact with the paper or when they were intellectually ready to access and
understand the content in the process of transforming their own belief
system through engagement and study. History is replete with such parallel
routes and all of human knowledge flows in uneven ways from East to West
and North to South as well as from one discipline to another where the
boundaries seem to be quite watertight and the transmission takes a lot of
time. The path to knowledge and to ignorance is quite convoluted and
meandering indeed especially at the leading edge.

Yes, your call for other list members to share their bibliographies is in
order and we will all be the wiser from such a sharing. Bernhard Burdek has
pointed out another difficulty and that is that of language. I can access
only resources in English and must wait for advanced concepts from other
languages to be translated and filtered down for us to make access and use
these in some meaningful way. Google translate, as it gets better may help
bridge this gap, but the resources must be made available in the first
place for us to be able to access these. Today design scholarship is moving
to many local languages in Asia as well and we will need to look at many
new sources for insights to inform and sustain design thinking and design
theory in the future.

With warm regards

M P Ranjan
from my Mac at home on the NID campus
7 February 2013 at 9.00 am IST

-------------------------------------------------------------
*Prof M P Ranjan*
*Design Thinker and author of blog -
www.Designforindia.com<http://design-for-india.blogspot.com/>
*
E8 Faculty Housing
National Institute of Design
Paldi
Ahmedabad 380 007 India

Tel: (res) 91 79 26610054
email: ranjanmp@g <[log in to unmask]>mail.com

<http://www.ranjanmp.in/>blog: <http://www.design-for-india.blogspot.com>
(current and with downloads)
education blog: <http://www.design-concepts-and-concerns.blogspot.com>
(archival)
education blog: http://www.visible-information-india.blogspot.com (archival)

web site: http://homepage.mac.com/ranjanmp (disabled by Apple)
<http://homepage.mac.com/ranjanmp>web domain: http://www.ranjanmp.in (disabled
by Apple)
<http://www.visible-information-india.blogspot.com/>
------------------------------------------------------------

On 6 February 2013 20:13, Charles Burnette <[log in to unmask]>wrote:

> Dear Ranjan ( I hope you don't mind me forwarding the email you sent me to
> the list.)
>
> Just the right response! Everybody will have their own history and
> references and the more they are known the better it will be.
> The Bibliography Behind A Theory of Design Thinking was compiled entirely
> from papers and books that I have read or produced and that are in my
> library. It is not complete even then as there are several important things
> that are in boxes in the basement.
>
> Having worked with Charles Eames at George Nelson's,  and with Klaus
> Krippendorff as both his student and colleague, I know how important they
> are to the history of design in India and elsewhere. I know I have some
> publications of their's that aren't in my bibliography and some probably
> aren't in yours. I've cited Klaus's book but not all the papers I have of
> his, including those he developed for his teaching of  product semantics at
> UArts. Maybe we should get him to post an  exhaustive bibliography of his
> work.
>
> Ranulff Glanville, Nigel Cross, Donald Norman, Bernhard Burdek, Terry
> Love, John Gero, you, and others who have a long history of contributing to
> the field should do the same. Perhaps as Terry noted Endnote files could be
> used to standardize and share all bibliographies  through some repository
> accessible to students and scholars everywhere. Maybe Terry's Love Web
> Services would provides such a home. or perhaps Cumulus through their
> secretariat in Helsinki (Hello Eija!)? Funding might follow the model that
> supports academia.edu whatever that model is? Or maybe there is some way
> to index bibliographies at different locations?
>
> We're all in this together! Aren't we Francois?
>
> Chuck
>
>
> On Feb 6, 2013, at 2:33 AM, Ranjan MP wrote:
>
> Dear Snehal
>
> This is with reference to our conversation yesterday about Prof Charles
> Brunette's bibliography.
>
> I attach here the Bibliography provided by Prof Charles Brunette on his
> Academia.edu web page. This is a fairly comprehensive list of all his
> papers as well as those that he claims have influenced him personally as
> well as widely helped in the shaping of Design Theory as well as Design
> Thinking and Design Methods from early beginnings at the turn of the last
> century.
>
> I have a few other authors in my own list who have influenced us at NID
> and in India since we have had access to these authors during our student
> days at NID as well as durung the period of our own explorations into
> design education since the early 70's. The journals from the HfG Ulm were a
> potent force for us and all these volumes were available in the NID library
> and now these are available online from my blog Design for India for
> download. The Ulm theorists include Tomas Maldonado, Gui Bonsieppe and a
> whole host of other teachers there.
>
> I would include here Bucky Fuller and Frei Otto who are not listed in
> Chuck's list. Further, Stafford Beer, Gregory Bateson and Piere Teilhard de
> Chardin who influenced us to explore systems thinking are not on his list
> too. There are others such as M K Gandhi and J Krishnamurthy who shaped our
> idelogical perspectives in design thought and action and some of these I
> have expanded on in my paper of 2009 for the Istanbul conference titled
> "Hand-Head-Heart: Ethics of Design" which also includes the development of
> semiotics as an influence in design thinking through the work of Klaus
> Krippendorf and Liz Sanders etc. Take a look at both and we can discuss
> these in the light of some that we both may have missed  from an
> architectural perspective.
>
> The most updated list should include The Design Way (2nd edition) by
> Harold Neslson and Eric Stolterman from the MIT Press, The Semantic Turn by
> Klaus Krippendorf and 101 Design Methods by Vijay Kumar. In the mid 70's
> and early 80's we had access to several books from the Open University, UK
> that were authored by Nigel Cross and Robin Roy. NID Library has an very
> good collection of books from the Design Council, UK as well.
>
> KD may kindly give Kiritbhai a copy of both these papers.
>
> with warm regards
>
> M P Ranjan
> from my at CEPT University
> 6 February 2013 at 1.05 pm IST
> --
> -------------------------------------------------------------
> *Prof M P Ranjan*
> *Design Thinker and author of blog - www.Designforindia.com<http://design-for-india.blogspot.com/>
> *
> E8 Faculty Housing
> National Institute of Design
> Paldi
> Ahmedabad 380 007 India
>
> Tel: (res) 91 79 26610054
> email: ranjanmp@g <[log in to unmask]>mail.com
>
> <http://www.ranjanmp.in/>blog: <http://www.design-for-india.blogspot.com>
> (current and with downloads)
> education blog: <http://www.design-concepts-and-concerns.blogspot.com>
> (archival)
> education blog: http://www.visible-information-india.blogspot.com
>  (archival)
>
> web site: http://homepage.mac.com/ranjanmp (disabled by Apple)
> <http://homepage.mac.com/ranjanmp>web domain: http://www.ranjanmp.in (disabled
> by Apple)
>  <http://www.visible-information-india.blogspot.com/>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
>
>
>
>


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